Streetscapes/998 Fifth Avenue, at 81st Street, Designed by McKim, Mead & White; A Majestic 1912 Apartment Tower for the Very Rich

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: March 30, 2003

THE imposing limestone apartment house at 998 Fifth Avenue, at 81st Street, is one of the most majestic ever built in New York, or even in the United States. Completed in 1912 and designed by McKim, Mead & White for the developer James T. Lee, grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the building counted among its most interesting attributes a broad iron and glass marquee over the 81st Street entrance. Although the marquee has long been blacked out with roofing tar, the owners of the building, now a co-op, are about to bring back the sunny side of the street.

In 1909, Lee and Charles R. Fleischmann bought the northeast corner of 81st and Fifth from the financier August Belmont, who had contemplated building his own mansion there. Lee hired the firm of McKim, Mead & White, which designed many of New York's grandest buildings, ranging from the Metropolitan Club at 60th and Fifth to the old Penn Station.

Residential Fifth Avenue had seen a few apartment buildings by 1910, but nothing like the 12-story 998 Fifth Avenue. McKim, Mead & White developed an all-limestone exterior in the Italian Renaissance style -- the exterior, for its time, looked more like a bank or a private club. Lee had the vision to combine the sensible efficiencies of a multiple dwelling with the scale of a country house, using an architectural language understood by families with housing budgets measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That vocabulary included wine rooms, safes for jewelry and silver, elevators paneled in French walnut, nontarnishing gold-plated hardware, nine coats of paint, refrigerators six feet wide and eight feet high, and seven bedrooms. In the typical apartment the dining room was 21 by 25 feet, a central oval salon was 16 by 20 and the living room was 21 by 24; all were flanked by a gallery that was 14 by 36. There were six to nine servants' rooms per apartment.

Eighteen families shared the building at rentals of up to $25,000 a year apiece. Together, the cost of land and construction amounted to about $3 million, or $250,000 per floor. An entire typical apartment house in those days cost about $250,000 to build.

In a 1915 article in The New York Times the broker Douglas Elliman recalled being very skeptical about the rents. ''It seemed very doubtful if 18 people could be found to pay $12,000 to $20,000 per annum,'' he said.

But he wrote that he found at least 100 prospects, and 998 Fifth Avenue rented up right away, at even higher rents. In 1912 the magazine Architecture called it ''the most remarkable thing of its kind in America.''

The exterior is notable for inset marble panels at the eighth and 12th floors, and the projecting iron and glass marquee over the main entrance. Built by the Harris H. Uris ironworks, the marquee (or, as it was more formally called in those days, the marquise) had a wire glass top and clear glass sides, allowing a flood of light into what was nominally an interior space.

Marquees of this sort had appeared on theaters and hotels in the late 19th century, and a few apartment buildings adopted them -- the 1885 Osborne, at 57th and Seventh, had one retrofitted about 1900, although it was removed by the 1940's.

McKim, Mead & White detailed the marquee for 998 Fifth Avenue with great care, noting in their drawings that the Uris firm had to submit models for the filigree on the ornamental trusses underneath the glazing, the supporting chains and the ornamental brackets and retaining escutcheons on the wall. Around the edge of the marquee they designed a delicate cresting of anthemion forms -- an ornamental palm-leaf pattern -- and an iron and clear glass valence below.

They also made sure to call for bronze plates separating the limestone from the iron elements, to protect the stone against rust marks. And they detailed a ring of light bulbs set into rosettes along the perimeter.

A certain mythology has sprung up about the first tenants at No. 998 -- that they initiated a mass desertion of dusty old mansions throughout New York in favor of the apartment house. This was furthered by news accounts that Elihu Root, a Nobel prize-winning statesman, writer and member of New York's elite, had rented one of the $25,000-a-year apartments.

Elliman later said that he had rented the apartment to Root at a reduced rate to counter a supposed prejudice by the very rich against apartment buildings, but this story has never been adequately documented. Root and several other tenants already lived in apartment buildings or hotels, so it may be that the problem was not an insufficient demand but an insufficient supply of the type of building the rich would find acceptable.

TYPICAL tenants included Watson Bradley Dickerman, president of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1890's; George B. Fearing, a railroad investor and the president after 1916 of the Knickerbocker Club, a men's club at 62nd and Fifth; Levi P. Morton, vice president of the United States under Benjamin Harrison from 1889 to 1893 and later governor of New York in 1895 and 1896; and Murry Guggenheim, a financier and mining operator who took the largest apartment, almost two full floors. Even with an apartment of that size, the 1915 census listed only Guggenheim and his wife, Leonie, in the apartment, with only two live-in servants.

The resources of this cohort of occupants were considerable. In 1920 Watson Dickerman's wife, Florence, was visiting Tiffany's and left a Russian sable coat on the seat of her car. A passer-by distracted her chauffeur, and another man took the coat and disappeared. It was worth $20,000.

Perhaps because of the prominence and wealth of the tenants, an unidentified man called the building's telephone operator in November 1920 and said he was going to blow up the building; a dozen police officers were posted, but nothing happened. The infamous Wall Street bombing, at Wall and Nassau Streets, which killed at least 36 people, had occurred that September.

Converted to a co-op in 1953, 998 Fifth Avenue has proved durable over the intervening decades. It was designated a landmark in 1974.

The building appears to have many of its original wooden window frames, which are usually one of the first things ripped out in the millionaire's apartment of our time.

On the marquee the valence of iron and glass was removed and the wire glass on top was painted out, providing shade but nothing like the clear, dappled sunlight evident in early photographs of the installation.

Next month the co-op will begin some minor masonry repairs and, more notably, a restoration of the marquee. According to Andrew Alpern, an architectural historian working on the project, the huge assembly will be dismantled and taken down this spring. Partly damaged elements will be repaired, and others entirely missing -- like the anthemion cresting and the clear glass valence -- will be replicated using old photographs and original architectural drawings.

Mr. Alpern said it appeared that light bulbs had actually never been installed in the rosettes, but the matter will become clearer once the disassembly permits him to look for traces of wiring and other details. He said that the sun should shine back in at the end of the summer, providing an interesting treat for the architectural pilgrim.

Photos: The building at 998 Fifth Avenue in 1912, far left, and today, right. Its iron and glass marquee (or as it was more formally called, marquise) in 1912. Around the edge of the marquee was a delicate cresting of anthemion forms, an ornamental palm-leaf pattern. (Collection of Andrew Alpern); (Michael Nagle for The New York Times); (Underhill/Museum of the City of New York)